I sometimes -- okay, quite often -- have to wonder if the people who write articles for the formerly mainstream media have brains. That thought is often followed up with another, similar thought about their editors -- do the editors really read all these articles and approve them?

Case in point -- I'm reading an article on Fox News about the recent rioting in Iraq. In the blurb on the front page (what do they call that -- the teaser?) and in the story, it says:

The motive for the killing was not immediately clear.

Hello?

McFly?

Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?

The next thought is to wonder if these people are intentionally dense or just playing dumb. The situation is really very simple. Someone tell the Fox News writers to head on over and read this before they write the next article about something which they are clearly ignorant.

In Iraq there are competing factions. The two largest are the Shiites and the Sunnis. The Sunnis are friends of Insane dictator Saddam. They hate the Shiites. While Saddam was in charge, the Sunnis ruled the country and killed Shiites whenever they felt like it, with the approval and direction of Saddam.

The U.S. entered the country and stopped the blatant slaughter of thousands of innocents. They got the people to make an uneasy truce -- the Sunnis hoping they could get control of the government once again. They did not.

So, the new government ends up being made up of a majority of Shiites. And that really annoys the Sunnis, who had been enjoying majority uncontested rule for decades. They are at relative peace, perhaps because they're finally all sick of the dying and the killing.

Wednesday comes and the Golden Dome gets destroyed by someone. It may have been some radical Sunnis, or it may have been al-Queerda, trying to stir up some killing. The Shiites have finally had enough of being killed and start fighting back, attacking their enemy of so long -- the Sunnis.

So, what's the motive? These people have been fighting for decades. Saddam's iron fist isn't in charge, so now the Shiites can actually fight back without being shot with chemical weapons, so they are.

Feel free to yell about this being America's fault in the comments, I will be sure to laugh at you for missing the entire post and the part about these two groups of people having been at war with one another for decades.

In addition to these two groups, there is another group, basically in the north, that doesn't like either one of these two (the Kurds).

So, what's the solution? When people are willing to die for their radical causes, there's not a lot that can be done. One idea is to go ahead and split the darn country up into three countries and let everyone have their own country. That would work fine for the Kurds (at least until they were taken over by Turkey), by the Shiites and the Sunnis would argue, at gunpoint, over who gets what land.

Is it a bad situation? You bet -- it's horrible. Blame it on the US? Sure, but if you do, then you'd also blame Cain and Abel's little spat on George Bush, too, wouldn't you?

Posted by: Ogre at 12:09 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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